Cthulhu Deep Down Under Volume 3

By IFWG Publishing International

In the story that first established the monstrous cosmic terrors of his Mythos writer H. P. Lovecraft said “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity...” Which makes it all the more fitting that the adepts of Lovecraft's vision writing today would choose to unveil ever-evolving and terrible fears besetting those that live on the largest island on the planet, and force the protagonists of some startling new horror fiction tales in this book to face, indeed, not placidity, but their own black seas of infinity...and madness.Again, some of the greatest scribes of the weird and startling from the land down under bring you brand new stories in the Lovecraftian genre, taking you from the realms of contemporary Australian cities, to the blood-soaked, post-colonial past (touching the powerful original cultures of the land), and even hinting at the disturbing future of Terra Australis.You will fear a sunburnt country.Tales of terror by Alan Baxter, David Conyers, Julie Ditrich, Jason Fischer, Steve Kilbey, Steven Paulsen, Steve Proposch, Alf Simpson, Cat Sparks, Maurice Xanthos. Introduction by Cat Rambo and Afterword by Jack Dann.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IFWG Publishing International
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781925956634

Book preview

Introduction

WHY I WILL ALWAYS LOVE (AND FEAR)

THE WORLDS CREATED BY H.P. LOVECRAFT

CAT RAMBO

I was a voracious reader as a child and, after I’d made my way through most of the fiction in the children’s room of our local library and had moved on to folklore and mythology as the next best thing, a decision was made among the adults in my life to give me access to the rest of the library. This was the norm at home already, where no bookcase was forbidden, but there was a certain gravitas had in being able to go down and pick out books from the much larger and grander first floor. The fantasy and science fiction section, my first stopping point, was at that time a handful of shelves set below one of the east-side windows. There was a set of H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories, a multi-volume set, and which­ever volume I grabbed during that initial foray contained The Dreams in the Witch House.

The witch’s familiar from the story, Brown Jenkin, gave me night­mares for at least a week, and remains hanging in my own personal closet of terrors. Adding to the fright was the fact that I couldn’t ask any adults for advice, lest the verdict be that my access to those books be removed. I knew, even then, I’d been hooked by the worlds they contained, including the Cthulhu mythos, which I’d revisit not just in the forms put forth by Lovecraft, but by his successors: Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and then in game form, with Call of Cthulhu.

I ran a Call of Cthulhu game for multiple years and still remem­ber particular moments with glee and fondness. And I kept read­ing in it, seeing new writer after new writer celebrating the universe where Cthulhu waits dreaming, drawn to its mysterious and sublime terrors, its caverns and mountains, and the horrific creatures that inhabit it.

The worlds are bleak, where unspeakable horrors lurk. Perhaps part of their appeal is that they embody the modern fears that creep around our own souls. Certainly they show us a side of what Lovecraft feared and hated; which poses another challenge—how to draw on that material without drawing on the racism and classism that underlay such images as the degraded denizens of Red Hook, dedicated to ancient and unappeasable gods, or the almost unintelligible locals in The Color Out of Space? How do we reach through Lovecraft’s filters to the terror beyond, that fear of the unknown that we carry deep in our brains, handed down by generation after generation? This is a challenge that all of the writers contained in this anthology have risen to.

These stories—following in the footsteps of two excellent pred­ecessors—bring the Cthulhu mythos to vivid life in Australia, placing it in locations across the country’s varied landscape and even the waters nearby. There are stories set in the modern day, where technology allows the intrepid to explore new depths below the earth’s surface and the ocean’s waves. Others take place in more urban modern jungles, such as nightclubs, or hospitals. Some mingle the soul-eroding moments of mundane life—of caring for a parent whose mind is failing—with the soul-flaying terror lurking in a piece of art. Others see a far flung future, where children are forced into a struggle not just for subsistence, but life, with death baying at their heels in the form of unearthly hounds. Others fall back to the end of existence itself, showing us the last moments of humans trying to connect and assemble meaning from each other in the face of worlds being gradually extinguished.

What does it mean to story-tell now, at a time when we see implacable elemental forces working in our own world: fires ravaging Australia, earthquakes twisting the earth’s spine, plague shutting down travel and socialising? These are stories of what people do in the face of an uncaring universe, how we band together to take on the worst that life can give us. They are moments where the impossible confronts us, and we do what humans have always done in the face of such tribulation: we say huh, that’s weird or oh, that’s sad or man, that’s tough then we readjust our­selves, we cry, or we swear, or we vent our anger, and then we continue on with life and its daily priorities.

Enjoy these stories. They’re stories of humans confronting monsters and unreal, alien landscapes, and yet, like so many of the stories written within Lovecraft’s incredible, ever-expanding universe, they are almost unbearably real.

ALL THE LONG WAY DOWN

ALF SIMPSON

I wouldn’t be too quick to believe what you’ve heard about the Ellie Dawes thing, because what you’ve heard is that we never found the body. That’s the official story—meaning, that’s what we told her family—but it’s not exactly true. It’s more that as a father, or a mother, or brother, there are certain things you just don’t need to hear. Certain things that make it worse, right when you thought it was the worst it could ever be.

It’s true about the rip. And it’s true that, maybe if we’d been a bit quicker, we could’ve got the boat out to her in time. But that’s always true. You could always have been quicker. Surf lifesavers patrol almost five hundred beaches around the country, but rips still take about nineteen lives a year. And people go: Oh, yeah, but that’s mostly tourists and people who don’t know what they’re doing. But they’re wrong. It’s mostly Australians, mostly young guys, and most of them are decent swimmers. Two out of three people who think they can spot a rip can’t.

Learmonth Point is just a little way north of Sydney. It’s not a popular enough beach that you’d have heard of it, but it’s got a big surfing crowd. There’s an SLS clubhouse there, usually pretty empty, and an observation tower. During the week, we’ll have two or three lifeguards patrolling, more on weekends and public holidays. On the good days we don’t do much. We get the flags set up, and people tend to try and stick between them. Sometimes they’ll swim a little way out trying to catch a wave, or they’ll catch a wave and it’ll carry them wide, but most of them are smart enough to paddle back in when that happens.

This was a Saturday, so there were four of us on duty—Darren and Sam on the sand, me and Jane in the tower. Things had been pretty quiet so far. It was almost four o’clock now, and a lot of the surfers had already swum in and were packing their gear. I was watching a couple of guys who’d been getting a bit too close to the rocks when Jane put down her binoculars.

She’s in a rip, she said.

I brought up my own binoculars. There was a young woman in the water, a good way outside the flags, clutching her board to stay afloat. Ellie Dawes, twenty-one years old. She was on a weekend trip up from Sydney, where she’d been studying history and French at UNSW. She had family in Melbourne, and a long-term boyfriend. I didn’t know any of this then.

We moved fast, although no one was panicking. Why would we? She had her board. It’d keep her afloat for as long as she needed. And she wasn’t struggling, either, so she obviously had some idea about what was going on. A lot of rips will take you back to shore if you let them. Or you can go parallel to the beach and try to reach the breaking waves. Just as long as you’re not fighting the current. Exhaustion is what’ll get you killed.

I radioed the others and they got the boat in the water and started making their way out. Ellie was probably a hundred metres offshore now. She’d been a long way out already, and she was moving fast. And then she was moving really fast.

Shit, said Jane. Look how quick she’s going.

She’s got the board, I said. They’ll get to her.

Jane had her binoculars back up. She’s accelerating, Tim. Like, she’s actually picking up speed.

As long as she holds onto—

And then she went under. Board and all.

Rip currents don’t do that. They’re strongest on the surface, and they don’t suck people down. For a moment I was thinking a shark had taken her, but we would’ve seen it. Or the guys in the boat would’ve seen it. Or seen her. She couldn’t have just disappeared.

She’s under! the radio crackled. I’ve lost her!

The boat crew were out there by now. At the place where she’d gone down.

Got anything?

No good. I’m jumping in.

We watched one of them, Sam, dive out of the rescue boat. She didn’t come up for a few seconds, and I had this flash of panic where I thought she’d been dragged down, too. But then she broke the surface, and, after another couple of seconds, Darren radioed back.

Sam says something’s kicked up a whole heap of sand. She can’t see anything.

What about the board? The board would’ve floated back up. And if she’d had the wrist-strap on, she’d have come with it, maybe. Though perhaps that was hoping for too much.

Jane was already talking to Emergency Search and Rescue. Fifteen minutes, she said to me.

Which was too long. Once you’re under, you’ve got about sixty seconds until your body forces you to inhale water. Then it’s minutes. We might already be looking for a body. We might’ve just watched a woman die.

I’ll grab the other boat, said Jane. She might’ve been dragged back by the rip. Maybe she’s still okay. We should search either way.

Yeah, I said. Good thinking.

The radio squawked again. Tim, Jane. Darren’s voice. We’ve got something.

Is it her? I asked, dreading all of the answers to that question.

No, but it’s…The sand’s cleared and we can see…Screw it, you’re going to have to come out and look at this.

I didn’t quite catch his tone—the meaning in it. I was following Jane, then I was helping her launch the boat, but I was also somewhere else. As the senior lifeguard on duty, whatever else happened today, I was soon going to be making a call to Ellie Dawes’s family and telling them that their daughter was gone. Missing or dead. It was a call I’d had to make twice before, to other parents and brothers and sisters and lovers, and I still made it sometimes in my dreams.

It wasn’t their voices I heard, but the silence. The moment after I’d said what I needed to say, and was simply waiting for the impossible to resolve. I say simply, because grief is simple. Blunt and ruinous.

And that was it, I think. That was why, in the end, I decided to tell them only half the story. The official version. That, and many other things. There’s an argument, and I’m not dismissing it outright, that they deserved the truth. For their grief. For their peace of mind. But there was no peace in this. And there are some things that no one deserves to know. Not really.

Because I couldn’t have said that. I couldn’t have endured that silence while they attempted to understand what I was telling them: yes, we knew exactly where their daughter’s body was, and no, we weren’t going to bring her back. We weren’t even going to try.

Sam was back in the water by the time we got out there. Jane looked around at the shore as we pulled up to the other boat.

This is crazy, she said. We’ve got to be half a kilometre out.

A rip current generally doesn’t run much further back than the breakers. That’s what a rip is—excess water from the breaking waves running back into the ocean. The only explanation I could think of was that Ellie had been unlucky enough to ride the rip current directly into the path of another, apparently even stronger current. Though what might’ve made that other current, I couldn’t imagine.

Sam was diving below us. She wasn’t going all the way down—it was seven metres deep here—just trying to get a better look.

And it was obvious what she was looking at, because the rest of us were looking at it too. Darren and me silent. Jane quietly swearing.

What is that? I asked.

Cave, said Darren. We reckon.

The wrong word. Caves are natural formations. Cracks and erosions between plates of rock. This was a hole. A gap. A place where the sea floor should have been, and wasn’t. Almost perfectly round, and you could’ve driven your car down it. A tunnel. I didn’t like that word either. Tunnel suggested connections. A junction. A light at the end. I didn’t want to know.

Sam’s trying to see if there’s anything. Darren was saying. Bits from the board, or…

Jane was shaking her head. She can’t be down there, she said. No way. How? She was holding a surfboard. Even if… Her voice had a numbness to it. And a hint of longing. Any other explanation. Please, god.

There’s nowhere else, I said, feeling it as well. This is where she went down.

Sam came back up, spitting water. It’s deep, she said. Seriously deep. I can’t see anything.

This is insane, said Jane. "We would’ve been told if something like this was here. We would’ve seen it. Where the fuck did it come from?"

There’s debris. Sam was climbing back into the boat with Darren. Broken rock and stuff around the edges. I’m thinking maybe it’s just opened up.

A cave-in, of a kind. A chamber of rock buried for years, maybe centuries, suddenly cracking open. The water rushing in, sucking down, down into the deep. The plug pulled from a giant tub. What were the odds of being out there, right next to it, at the moment it happened? Slim, but not slim enough.

You think that’s it? I asked. The floor—roof—broke, and it sucked her in?

I’m positive, Sam said, pulling her swim cap off. She vanished, Tim. She just straight up disappeared. She’s got to be in there.

And, by now, almost certainly dead. Closing in on twelve minutes underwater. We stared into the hole, each of us sinking down. Swimming, struggling for the surface, only to find ourselves going backwards. Sliding down a slope in a nightmare. Mouths locked against the pressure while our throats pumped for air. That impossible choice between endings. And the dark. That deep dark.

Fuck, said Jane.

Search and Rescue’s here, said Darren.

Fuck, said Jane again. A sob.

The rescue diver went as far as the entrance, then came straight back up.

Fuck that, I heard him saying to his team. Dropped a flare, and it’s still fucking falling. Thing’s got to be more than fifty metres deep. There’s no way in hell.

There were more boats in the water, vehicles on the beach. The rescue team got us to patrol the shoreline. We weren’t going to find her, and everyone knew it, but it felt like something. It was better than staring into that hole, drifting above it. Less helpless.

It got dark, and the searchlights came on. A police helicopter made a few passes over the course of an hour, then had to pull out to refuel. The boats stayed longer. Cones of light out on the water, scanning at first, then all gradually circling around to the same point. Down. Enough light to see the darkness. And even then, only the edge of it.

We knew Ellie’s name by now. One of the searchers had found her car in the parking area, and tracked the plates to her father in Melbourne. I’d made the call from the tower. Listened to that awful silence. Heard the disbelief in the background, then the crying. And at the end he’d said thank you, thank you for telling me, his voice blank with hate. I hadn’t killed Ellie, but I’d brought them her death. I put the phone down, shaking.

Jane poured me tea from her thermos. You okay?

No.

Are they coming up, the parents?

I rubbed my eyes. Lights on the water. I think they will, yeah.

We’re not going to show them the…?

Would you want to see it?

She sat back. Screwed the cap on. If it was my family down there, then yes, I would.

Why?

"Because I’d hate not knowing. I’d hate even feeling like I didn’t know."

Even if there was nothing you could do?

"There’d be something. Even just being there. Even just imagin­ing it, with all the facts. Just looking." Her gaze had travelled to one of the vans on the beach. The rescue diver was packing his gear into the back.

You can’t blame him, I said. It’s a crazy risk to take, just to recover a body.

He didn’t even go inside.

He doesn’t know what’s down there. No map, no light. It might not even be stable.

You think I’m being harsh?

A bit.

Well, fuck you. I’m not. She drank her own tea, cradling the mug in both hands. We were thinking of heading back soon. Sam’s place. It’s closest. A searchlight passed over us. You should come—try to get some sleep.

Sleep wasn’t going to happen for any of us tonight, I thought. But it would be good to be with friends. I stared out at the water.

Come on, said Jane, standing up, her hand on my shoulder. They don’t need us anymore.

And it ended, that never-ending night. And we did sleep, all of us, sometime between then and dawn, spread out in blankets and sleeping bags around Sam’s coffee table and across her sofa. Needing each other in the way you need people in the dark. Their presence. Their nearness.

The search continued for a week, and we helped where we could. They brought in a few professional cave divers, who made a short foray into the hole, but came up empty-handed. It just keeps going down, were the words. After that, they gave it a shot with a submersible drone. This bottomed out at around a hundred metres, as far as the remote connection would hold. And still nothing. It just kept going down.

A geologist came out to look at the site. His explanation for the cave’s existence consisted mostly of jargon about water tables and limestone erosion, but was also littered with ‘shouldn’t be’ and ‘shouldn’t have’. Shouldn’t be that deep. Shouldn’t have formed the way it had. Shouldn’t be there at all, but was. He didn’t say he was baffled, and he didn’t need to.

Meanwhile, the news had spread and the mourners had come. Ellie’s family. Her friends. Surfers who’d been there that day. Candles and wreaths in the water. Darren and Sam brought flowers. Jane helped toss them into the waves. I stayed in the tower, watching. A tide of tears and petals.

And then, a few days later, it was finished. The rescue, turned recovery, had been called off. The waves had washed away the wreaths. The surfers had come back. The only difference was the sign we’d put up on the beach—a warning to keep away from the cave. Not that anyone needed it. A few more divers came by—thrill-seekers, this time—but only made it just past the entrance before deciding to turn back. I caught them in the car park and asked them why.

I don’t know, one of them said, towelling her hair. We got maybe ten metres in and I started feeling really weird.

Like narcosis? I asked.

Yeah, that’s what I thought at first, but we weren’t that deep. I’ve been narked before, too, and this was new. More intense. Real call-to-the-void shit, y’know? I wanted to swim down. More than wanted to. I started thinking I’d die if I didn’t. Then Matt grabbed my foot—I’d just started going for it. So, yeah, we came back up.

The rescue divers had mentioned something similar. At least, the ones who’d agreed to go in. A few, like the first, had simply refused. The others had found themselves gripped by that same desire to swim down.

It wasn’t unusual. Breathing compressed air at depth messes with your head. Past thirty metres or so, the air in your tank literally becomes toxic, causing what’s called nitrogen narcosis. It creates a sense of drunken euphoria, sometimes dread, and makes it difficult to focus. Divers can become wildly overconfident, forget to check their air supply, or confuse down for up. It gets worse as you go deeper.

But the others had all said, too, that this wasn’t like anything they’d felt before. These were all experienced divers. They did this for a living. They knew what narcosis was and they knew that this was different. Something about the hole had drawn them in, or pushed them away.

I went back to the tower to find Jane with her binoculars raised. It was just the two of us today. There were four surfers out on the waves, but she wasn’t looking at them.

What’s up? I asked.

See that guy? Down by the water?

I did. And I definitely didn’t need binoculars. Yeah…

What would you say he was doing?

He was short and bearded. Greyish hair under a bucket hat. Maybe early fifties. He had a jacket on, and shorts, but bare legs and feet. I would’ve picked him as a fisherman, except for the fact he didn’t have a rod or any equipment. He was carrying a small basket; at this distance, I couldn’t tell what was in it.

Beachcombing, I guessed.

Yeah. Except he’s not picking up shells. Or sponges. Or anything, really.

How long have you been watching him?

Today, only an hour or so.

I didn’t like the way she said that. And yesterday?

All day. And the day before that. And before that. He’s been here every day since the memorial. That’s when I saw him first.

So he’s a relative of Ellie’s, you think?

Did you speak to her family at all?

No.

Well I did. He doesn’t look a thing like them.

That doesn’t prove anything. I was starting to feel uncomf­ortable. We were very visible in the tower, and it wouldn’t be hard to tell where Jane was pointing her binoculars, if the man happened to glance up. Should you really be doing that?

Doing what? It’s my job to watch people. Our job.

Not like this. This feels like spying.

"Nearly a week he’s been doing this, and he hasn’t put a single fucking shell in that basket. Not one. You want